Intricacies of Obamacare still taking shape, GDOL speaker says

Government and business reporter

As the stipulations and regulations that form the musculature of the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, take shape, David O. Woodruff joked it’ll be good for at least one thing — keeping his consultant firm afloat as it explains the Byzantine labyrinth of the law to employers.

“This is the World Trade Center of laws,” he told a group of employers and their representatives Wednesday. “It is the biggest one out there.”

Dozens of people filled the Georgia Department of Labor offices for a Lunch and Learn event to hear the explanation for a law that dominated headlines for much of President Barack Obama’s first term, but is just now being filled out by an alphabet soup of federal agencies. Woodruff, a managing partner at A.I. Group, an employee benefits company, ran through percentages and other aspects of the law — what defines affordable, how state exchanges will affect employers and new taxes — in about two hours of slides.

Woodruff said that the when the votes were settled, it was 2,000 pages. Since then, it’s jumped to about 24,000 pages as rules, guidelines and final regulations and “interim final regulations” filter through.

He noted how then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., infamously said, “We have to pass the (bill) so that you can find out what’s in it,” and how prescient that ended up being.

“It was like a Hollywood set,” Woodruff said of the bill. “Everyone can see the outside of it, but there’s nothing on the inside.”

In essence, it set up a framework that bureaucrats have since been filling in with details to meet its goals. In the meanwhile, those 24,000 pages have grown and grown, even as some pages and passages have been thrown out. Between a quarter and 30 percent of them are no longer valid, he said.

“What you read in August may or may not be correct,” Woodruff said. “What you read in December may or may not be correct.”

As it stands now, the regulatory maze of subsidies and state health insurance exchanges makes it so the healthier employees will pay higher rates — as much as 25 percent, or higher by other estimates — while the unhealthiest groups pay less. Essentially, the expanded pool means those needing the most care don’t have to bear as much of a brunt for their cost of care. But he’s more pessimistic about the effect that will have on younger workers.

“If you’re young and healthy, you’re going to (get) hammered and you won’t want to be fully insured,” Woodruff said.

But, as Woodruff noted more than once in his presentation, Obamacare is far from finalized and the complexities of what has been more-or-less finalized are still being explored.

“To anyone who stands up and says, ‘I know the law inside and out,’ it’s baloney,” Woodruff said.

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